Donald Trump’s return to the White House is not a victory for women and girls. Such a statement ought to be uncontroversial — there are the rape accusations, the endorsement of sexual assault, the threat of a further erosion of reproductive rights. Men who say they’ll protect women “whether they like it or not” do not want to protect women as people, only as property. Trump’s is a misogyny so obvious, so plainly in sight, it almost feels boring to comment on it, let alone to acknowledge the full horror of what it means. 

But hey, at least he knows what a woman is.

It’s not that I don’t understand the anger; I just don’t think this is how this problem can be solved

I have seen variations on this line ever since his victory was announced. Trump might hate women (amongst multiple other groups), but unlike many of his opponents on the left, at least he’s not denying the existence of the entire female sex class. At least he’s not calling women bigots and bullies for complaining about male competitors on their swimming teams, male bodies in their changing rooms, male rapists in their prison cells. At least he might put a stop to this form of rampant misogyny, regardless of whether he’s doing it for the right reasons. I don’t think he will, though. It’s not that I don’t understand the anger; I just don’t think this is how this problem can be solved. You can’t fight misogyny with misogyny (or rather, you can — but either way, women will lose). 

Lest I should be misunderstood, this is no way to let “the other side” off the hook. I am beyond pissed off at how willing so many on the left were to ignore both the harms done to women and gender-distressed children by extreme trans activism, and the massive open goal created for the right by the rise of sex denialism. It’s not as though left-wing feminists had not been warning their peers of this for years. If you really, really care about abortion rights, why would you bunch them together with support for “gender affirming” care? If you can tell that a man who says “grab ‘em by the pussy” does not respect women’s privacy, what could make so many of you cheer on a convicted sex offender who got his penis out in a women’s spa? If you really grasped what was at stake — and god knows, you should have — why didn’t you take it all more seriously? When Matt Walsh produced What Is a Woman?, highlighting all of the excesses of leftist gender madness, you could have said “okay, that is mad — but it’s not what we think”. Instead, you thought “yeah, but the other side is worse” would suffice. After all, beggars can’t be choosers, and what is a woman threatened with losing access even to contraception but a beggar? 

It’s not just the left’s cavalier approach to protecting reproductive choice that has been dismaying. It can feel as though there has been an abandonment of the most basic feminist principles. There’s nothing idle or frivolous about asking how you can defend women’s rights while refusing to define what a woman is. It’s not that you can’t still do good, important work using resources created by women who did acknowledge sex difference, but it’s hard not to notice these resources being chipped away at in ways that feel inevitable as soon as a woman is anyone who says they are (as shown, for instance, by the loss of specificity in abortion rights campaigns, or the undermining of Title IX for sports). It can feel as though this process will go on and on until there is nothing left — just women simulating the work of feminism, no longer on behalf of women and girls themselves, just vaguely in the name of “bodily autonomy” (but whose body, anyways?). 

This is where “at least they know” can sneak in. It’s as though those who acknowledge sex differences — even if they are currently using this knowledge to remove women’s rights — can seem to have more of a starting point for not removing them. It can feel as though they have the right foundations, even if right now they’re building the wrong house, whereas the leftist sex denialists were bequeathed a lovely feminist mansion but are busy blowing up the basement. 

In her book Hounded, Jenny Lindsay lists three “core beliefs”: 

1: women are materially definable as a class of human being […] 2: women (as adult female humans) are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with their own sets of needs, rights and concerns […] 3: women have a right to meet and discuss freely that which affects their lives profoundly.

The first belief is a prerequisite to holding the other two, even if one also can hold it independently. This is why, I think, it can sometimes seem as though the trans activist-supporting left will end up letting down women most of all. They don’t even get as far as core belief 1! Even if they retain some feminist beliefs for now, eventually it will all fall apart!

I understand how it can look that way. I don’t think it’s true. Trump et al. might say they know what a woman is, but do they really? Is acknowledging sex differences genuinely enough? When defining core belief (1), Lindsay goes on to argue that “the only criterion for being a woman is to be a female girl who survives into adulthood:”:

… no personality traits, no interests, no adornment or style of dress, no mandatory life choice must flow from this definition.

I think we can all see this is not how Trump and his fellow right-wing misogynists define “woman”. Such men go way beyond it. There’s nothing neutral about their definition at all. 

“Grab ‘em by the pussy” misogynists make no distinction between sex (as a biological reality) and gender (as a social hierarchy). The two are completely intertwined — just as they are for trans activists. Right-wing men are not going to one day “forget” their own gender ideology and just see women for who we are, in all our diversity. To them, we are “protected” whether we like it or not. When trans activist Andrea Long Chu defines “as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another”, Trump is in total agreement. He’s all for essentialised feminine submission. He merely takes a dim view of male people who base their whole identities on a sexualised version of it (if he thinks of them at all). 

One of the key ways in which trans activism has been mis-sold as feminism has been by pretending sex and gender are inseparable. Judith Butler does this when she asserts that “feminism has always insisted that what a woman is is an open-ended question, a premise that has allowed women to pursue possibilities that were traditionally denied to their sex” (as if redefining “woman” as “a female person who can have the right to vote” were the same as redefining her as “a female person who can have a penis”). Amia Srinivasan does it, too, when she insists that “sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise”. These writers would insist that viewing women as necessarily biologically female is no different to viewing women as passive sexual objects or brood mares – which is, of course, how the misogynist right does view them. We already know that academia, publishing and the media are full of people willing to tell young women these are their only options: deny your personhood or deny your sex. In the end, Trump and Butler are in agreement that woman as adult human female equals woman as lesser being. Neither of them respect our humanity as it is. 

I am aware this does not solve any of the immediate practical issues facing women and girls. Voting while feminist should not resemble an extreme version of the trolley problem, whereby whatever is chosen, one can be accused of sacrificing some women, and instead of being given hope, one is faced with a protection racket over rights that are not being well-protected to start with. Even so, the harm done by Trump to women and girls is not limited to what he believes about women and girls as a class, but about race, sexuality, ethnicity and so many other things besides.  

In the end I think there is far more potential for “liberal” sex denialists to be led back to reason than there is for right-wing patriarchs to ever drop their own flawed definition of “woman”. We are already seeing the former in some parts of the UK left and god knows, the process is annoying. It is maddening to think of all the unpicking that will be required to remove these toxic ideas from so many institutions, and no one will ever apologise for the mess they were complicit in creating. It is better, though, than throwing one’s lot in with men who demonise and pathologise all forms of gender non-conformity — men who have no interest in changing at all. 

… we don’t have to sacrifice what we believe and what we know

One does not have to be a feminist to see many of the problems with trans activism and sex denialism. There’s a reason, though, why feminists saw them first, and why feminist views are the ones least engaged with by Butler et al. It’s because we’re the biggest — indeed, the only — real threat to the ideas both “sides” promote. If we become Butler’s caricature of us, we only make her stronger (think of her as academia’s Emperor Palpatine, if you will). We might have to make sacrifices in the voting booth — I, too, know the pain of voting for a party filled with activists who consider me TERF scum, even if in my case, they won — but we don’t have to sacrifice what we believe and what we know. 

A woman is neither a barefoot tradwife nor “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes”. We’re adult human females, deserving of every right, and we have to keep saying this whenever we can.